Poet, critic, playwright, novelist, historian, educator, librarian, writer of children's books, Arna Bontemps was also a voracious reader, devoted family man, pioneering Afro-American literary figure, and, above all, a champion of freedom for all...

"Time," wrote Arna Bontemps in his sixty-sixth year, "is not a river. Time is a pendulum." Certainly this black writer's voluminous contributions in literature and history support that theory and are informed by it. Bontemps's histories of the black...

Arna Bontemps (1902-1973) was an accomplished librarian, historian, editor, poet, critic, and novelist. His diverse occupations were unified by the common goal of forwarding a social and intellectual atmosphere in which African-American history,...

The Ravinia Festival will celebrate the life and works of distinguished Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps in a special program featuring Symphony II and the students of Chicago's Bontemps Elementary School on April 23. The program, which is free and open to the...

On the blank side of a July 1960 calendar page, Arna Bontemps wrote a message to himself for an autobiography he never finished. Its planned title was A Man's Name. The note read: "I speak for the tormented souls who are doomed to struggle...

Bontemps' poems [collected in Personals] make use of several recurring themes: the alien-and-exile allusions so often found in New Negro poetry; strong racial suggestiveness and applications; religious themes and imagery subtly used; and the theme of return to a former time, a former love, or a remembered place. On occasion he combines in a way common to lyrical writing the personal with the racial or the general. Many of these poems are protest poems; but the protest is oblique and suggestive rather...

[Black Thunder] is a superior piece of work. Interest in the action is sustained; the minds and feelings of the blacks are made lucid and believable; and the atmosphere is unique. Bontemps accomplished these ends partly through the skillful use of various motifs from Negro folklore. Several episodes of the novel are pervaded by beliefs and customs that appear in this folklore—beliefs and customs concerning death and the spirit, the importance of 'signs' or portents, and the use of Magic...

In that limited and almost barren field known as the Negro novel, Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder fills a yawning gap and fills it competently. Covering all those skimpy reaches of Negro letters I know, this is the only novel dealing forth-rightly with the historical and revolutionary traditions of the Negro people. Black Thunder is the true story of a slave insurrection that failed. But in his telling of the story of that failure Bontemps manages to reveal and dramatize through the character of his pr...